New Champlain College program takes new approach to helping high schoolers learn the do's and don'ts of money and credit

Jun. 6, 2012

Written by

John Pelletier

The majority of this spring’s high school graduates are not ready to take on the world financially. Many of these teenagers lack the skills and knowledge that they need to successfully navigate today’s complex financial world. They have confusing financial choices to make regarding student loans, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages, budgeting and saving for a rainy day and for retirement.

Despite these complexities they are rarely given instruction, in the classroom or at home, to make wise decisions. Learning is being done through personal experience. Making mistakes with your credit is a painful way to learn a life lesson.

Few of these students will retire with a pension. Given our fiscal situation, it is likely that their Social Security and Medicare benefits will be reduced and available after age 67. The quality of their retirement will be almost entirely dependent on when they start saving, how much they save and how they invest their savings. So much is expected from this young generation, but so little is taught.

Less than half of this year’s high school graduates in Vermont will enroll in college next fall. For them, high school may be their last chance to learn about personal finance. Going to college rarely helps. Most colleges do not offer and only a few (like Champlain College) require personal finance instruction.

Young people are not learning about personal finance at home. A recent Schwab survey asked teenagers what topics their parents talk to them a lot about. Only 46 percent of teenagers indicated that that their parents talked to them about smart money management concepts which was slightly higher than talking to them about sex (44 percent) but materially lower than talking to them about cleaning their room (59 percent).

To help solve this personal finance education deficit, the Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College launched a new program this April to study the effectiveness of financial literacy education in three Vermont high schools. The pilot is the result of a partnership between the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation, National Endowment for Financial Education (NEFE) and five Vermont financial institutions.

(Page 2 of 2)

The goal of the pilot program is to compare the knowledge and behaviors of high school students that take a personal finance course taught by highly trained educators with a control group of high school students that have not received any classroom instruction on this important topic.

With the information we gather in this project, we hope to prove that a personal finance class taught by a highly trained teacher has a material positive impact on the knowledge and behaviors of the high school students who receive this instruction. We hope that this pilot will show our state and our nation that it is important to train our teachers on personal finance topics and even more important to have students graduate high school that are financially savvy.

All teachers that participate in this pilot will be trained to teach personal finance at our Centers Vermont Teachers Financial Literacy Summer Institute. This nationally recognized program is a graduate level course designed to give 105 Vermont teachers the confidence skills and curriculum tools that they need to successfully bring personal finance education into their classrooms.

The summers session will be held from June 25 to June 29. The Summer Institute uses the Jump$tart Teacher Training Alliance Curriculum. This innovative curriculum was designed by a national steering committee consisting of the Jump$tart Coalition, NEFE, Council of Economic Education, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Family Economics and Financial Education, Junior Achievement, and the U.S. Departments of Education and Treasury. Our Center was the third national test site for this curriculum last August.

Our high schools should graduate financially sophisticated students who can make smart choices about saving, investing and spending, as they head to college or begin life in the workforce. We hope that the Centers high school pilot program will help Vermont achieve this important goal.

John Pelletier is director of the Center for Financial Literacy at Champlain College and formerly chief operating officer of Natixis Global Associates and chief legal officer of Eaton Vance Corp.